Mean times in Greenwich

The press united against the Dome - perhaps because several media grandees were caught in the queue. But the paying customers seem to have got their money's worth. Patrick Wintour and Anthony Browne report
The Millennium: special report

Mike Lockett, an abrasive, entrepreneurial events organiser, got locked into the Dome debacle at a dinner at the house of former Tory Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo. Over the meal Portillo and Labour's then Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, were kicking round names for someone to organise the New Year's Eve celebrations. Lockett had worked for the Tories putting together their conferences. As a nod to the non-party political nature of the millennium celebrations, Mandelson agreed.

Last week Lockett flew back from a skiing holiday to wade straight into a blazing row with Jennie Page, chief executive of the new Millennium Experience Company, over who should carry the can for the disasters that plagued the Dome's millennium party. In retrospect the organisers could not have planned a worse public relations disaster if they had tried. For among the hundreds of guests forced to queue for more than three hours in the open with their families at Stratford Tube station in east London, before arriving late for the celebrations, were seven national newspaper editors, along with their wives and children, including the Times's Peter Stothard, the Independent's Simon Kelner, and the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger. Greg Dyke, new director-general of the BBC, was also fuming in the crowd.

The fall-out was inevitable. In the week that has followed, the media has transformed a national cock-up into a national disaster, as every columnist worth their salt weighed into Ministers and the management of the Dome.

And inevitably too, those involved in the debacle have turned on each other - most furiously, Page and Lockett.

As last week's meeting opened, Page was blaming Lockett. Lockett, however, was determined not to be a scapegoat, and as the meeting ended he extracted an admission that the responsibility lay with Page and the NMEC for failing to send out the tickets on time.

Page's anger over the debacle was twofold. She was furious not just because senior opinion formers had been forced to stew, but she was also painfully aware of how much first impressions count. If the operation betrayed any sign of incompetence in its first week of opening to the public, an indelible tone would be set. She was right to be worried: press coverage in the Dome's first week proved unrelentingly hostile.

Commentator after commentator who visited the Dome wrote scathing pieces. They insisted the displays were boring and uneducational. Even Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist who had previously been a strong supporter of the Dome described it as 'a lemon'.

Some of this criticism was motivated by revenge. Some editors - furious at the way their Millennium Eve was ruined - had, it appeared, ordered journalists to get 'anti-Dome' stories, a job made easy by continuing teething problems.

During the opening weekend, visitors were forced to queue for up to two hours to visit some of the zones, in which they spent only seven minutes. Headlines described it as 'the Disaster Zone', and just six days after the Dome opened, the Times - whose editor was one of those kept waiting - ran a page one splash, headed: 'Dome tickets flop forces big relaunch'.

With so many political reputations riding on it, the nervousness is now palpable in Whitehall. The Dome's difficulties have become entwined with more intractable political issues. If the project proves a monstrous waste of money as heart patients die for lack of an NHS bed, Labour's hard-earned reputation for reading the popular mood will take a body blow.

Already, there are indications that it could become a wider liability. A poll in the Economist last week suggested 56 per cent of voters now believe the Government was wrong to build the Dome, and only 35 per cent think it was right.

Tony Blair cannot distance himself from the project. While he may have been uncertain about whether to press ahead with the Tories' grandiose visison, his own reputation is now intimately linked to the Dome's success. Unlike Chancellor Gordon Brown, a long-term opponent of the project, Blair has been forced to tie himself ever closer to it.

The need to find business sponsors and to generate public enthusiasm has required Downing Street to become part of the marketing department for the Dome. Blair has even said the Dome will form the first paragraph of his manifesto for re-election.

If Blair has been cunning, it has been in tying so many other people to the project. The Dome has become the ultimate Blairite big tent. Anyone from its original Tory enthusiast, Michael Heseltine, the journalist Simon Jenkins, Bob Ayling, head of British Airways, Sam Chisolm, Michael Grade, the PR expert Mathew Freud, film-maker David Puttnam and Alan Yentob, the BBC executive, were persuaded to give time to make the Dome a success.

British big business has put its shareholders' cash on the line by sponsoring the zones. Among the firms involved are Tesco. Manpower, BT, GEC Marconi, BSkyB and Marks & Spencer. If it fails, it will be a condemnation not only of the political classes, but also of British business and British design. The roll-call of scapegoats will be long and prestigious.

It will also mark the failure of a grand vision. For the millennium company was not set up just to create a day out for the family. The celebrations were intended to help re-energise the nation, raise the self-esteem of its people and enhance the world view of this country.

So when Downing Street officials summoned journalists covering the project to hear the Prime Minister's view last Friday, it was for a rap over the knuckles.

'Not for one minute does Tony Blair regret the decision to go ahead with it,' insisted his spokesman. 'The people who go there are overwhelmingly saying something positive about it. In our view, it is a success.

'Stratford was obviously a problem... but the way those involved have allowed that to discolour their views is completely out of proportion. The way that papers were determined to be negative is out of touch not just with the visitor but the general public.'

The Dome management is also on the offensive. Having apologised for the ticketing fiasco Lord Falconer and Jennie Page summoned journalists to say the same: the press is out of touch. 'Our visitors are saying we've had a fantastic day out, and asking why the press aren't talking to them.'

And there is some truth in Page's claim that things are improving. Queues are easing, but only because the number of visitors has fallen sharply. In a fraught exchange, Page refused seven times to tell journalists how many tickets had been sold, nor how many they hoped to sell, but urged journalists to trust her that they were soaring above target.

The truth, according to one source, is this. The Dome got 52,000 visitors in the first week, around 17,000 a day. By midweek that had fallen to just over 12,000. Even the queue-ridden figure of 17,000 is only about half the level the organisers need to reach each day through the year to meet their 12 million sales target. And Ministers insisted at the outset that the only test for the Dome was sales, not critical acclaim.

That target of 12m ticket sales was based on judgments about the popularity of other comparable days out. To achieve this, the company reckoned it would need 226 'short days' in which the site would be open from 10am to 6pm and 140 long days when the site would be open from 10am to 11pm. At the maximum there would be a daily throughput of 35, 000 visitors staying for an between four and seven hours. Once inside, each would spend £4 a head on merchandise.

The managers may have promised to tackle the queues, but they said they would do little to meet the complaints about the content, insisting that most members of the public were happy. They would keep the zones under review to make sure they were exciting. But while they may be 'tweaked', any significant changes to meet the critics' charges that it was 'a lemon' have been ruled out.

But the complaints about the Dome are not confined to irritated newspaper editors and some members of the public. Far from taking pride in their work, many of those who worked on the Dome are also unimpressed with the end result.'It's all pretty mediocre,' said one Dome adviser. 'The Natural History Museum is more fun.'

Peter Higgins of Land Design managed to turn the Play Zone into one of the few obvious highlights, but he is critical of many of the other zones, as well as of the public areas between where visitors spend most of their time.

'No one has designed the common spaces. They are left-over backwaters, but they should be the places that hold the whole thing together. But there weren't designers in charge and you could tell that,' said Higgins.

But no one seems more disappointed than Eva Jiricna, the fashionable architect who designed the Faith zone. 'As far as the final product is concerned, I am very frustrated with how the content is organised,' Jiricna told The Observer. 'The architecture and design quality could have been much better.

'The Millennium Company controlled too much of the process so the design team was limited in what they can do. They didn't really care about the architecture or design.'

Jiricna's brief was particularly tough because of the compromises inevitable in dealing with such a sensitive issue as religion. But as a result of the Government's decision to involve private finance, most of the other zones had major corporate sponsors - donating more than £12m each - who insisted in getting their money's-worth.

The destructive battle between sponsor and designers and the Dome company was at its most severe in Money Zone, sponsored by the Corporation of London. The Corporation lost confidence in the designer appointed by the Dome, and insisted on appointing its own. Eventually the NMEC also lost trust in its own designer and appointed another one, so the Zone ended up with three different designers working on it simultaneously.

'The sponsor was a pain in the neck,' said one insider. 'They kept trying to lead the project by the nose, but what is good for the sponsor is not necessarily right for a good display.'

Subsequently many members of the public have complained that being in the Talk Zone feels like in being in a BT advert, while the Journey Zone is almost wall to wall Ford logos.

'Everyone was saying it must not end up looking like a trade show, but that's what it does look like,' said one disappointed Dome adviser.

If the Dome does prove a failure, who will take the blame?

It is true that it took the Conservative government a long time to choose the Greenwich site and in doing so selected land that needed lengthy decontamination. Then there was a further delay as it tried to persuade the private sector, and in particular, British Airways, to run the whole enterprise. Ayling, however, recognised cannily there were too many commercial variables and decided it would be a nightmare for the airline of if it did take charge.

The result was that it was not until December 1996 that the idea of a public sector company with a vastly reduced budget was finally accepted by the Millennium Commission.

It then took until three months after the 1997 general election to persuade the deeply divided new Labour Cabinet to press ahead with the scheme.

In the long-term fallout, the positions that Cabinet members took on the Dome may come back to haunt them: Peter Mandelson, the enthusiast; Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary, who was looking for something more educational; David Blunkett and Frank Dobson, who opposed the project; and Gordon Brown, who was its greatest enemy. In the end, it was the enthusiasm of John Prescott as Deputy Prime Minister that saved it.

Now a Conservative project fumbled by its private sector management and by the interference of big business, is threatening to force Blair, its biggest champion, to carry the can.